Dear Therapist Student Lady,
You’re very nice, but I don’t fully understand how it is helpful for you to poke and poke at sensitive topics until I start to cry, only to stop and initiate deep breathing exercises to calm me down, and then repeat the process. How does this get us anywhere? I admit that the deep breathing exercises do help calm me down when I am struggling against tears, but I’m not sure they’ll be helpful against the depression in general because we never seem to get that far.
I’m trying to be open minded to your strategies, but if I hear you talking about mindfulness one more time, I might lose my patience with you. It’s not that I don’t know that I am sad, or why I am sad, or in what way I am sad. It’s just that I don’t know how to answer questions like “and this sadness… how does it feel in your body?” or “and what do you feel, when you are sad?”
Nor do I understand how I can take the tension from my leg muscles and let it float away on brown leaves in a stream. I’ve never seen plant life that could do that. But I didn’t ask because we were already an hour overtime and the last thing I wanted to do was to send you off on another tangent. As it is, the fire alarm went off and even that didn’t make you stop talking about being mindful of the body. Also, when you tell me to take the thoughts that drift through my mind and add them to these same leaves, is it okay that “this is bull shit” is part of the thought-detritus that this stream is supposed to be washing away?
I’m trying, I really am.
But I’m finding you trying, too.
kthanksbai,
Carol
P.S. It’s really hard to breathe from the diaphragm when it’s being crushed up under my lungs.
If By Yes 